My father’s glasses did not entirely separate him from boys his own age. During his first years in Independence, the Truman home was one of the star attractions of the neighborhood, thanks to its extensive animal farm. John Anderson Truman built a little wagon and had harnesses especially made for a pair of goats that he hitched to it, and every boy in town was soon begging my father and his brother for a ride. When the boys grew older and turned to sports, my father would occasionally join them, at least during the baseball season, as umpire.
But my father spent most of his time reading books that Mamma Truman carefully selected for him. His favorite was a red-backed four-volume set of biographies by Charles Francis Home, Great Men and Famous Women. These were the books that made him fall in love with history. To this day, he still insists that reading biographies is the best way to learn history. He is also a firm believer in what some cynical historians have called the great man theory. Dad sums it up more positively. “Men make history. History does not make the man.”
My father’s second preference, after Home’s biographies, was the Bible. By the time he was twelve, he had read it end to end twice and was frequently summoned to settle religious disputes between the various branches of the Truman and Young families, who were divided among Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists. He also discovered the Independence Public Library, and by the time he had graduated from high school, Dad had devoured all of the books on its shelves that might interest a boy. Included in this diet, of course, were great gobs of history. He remained totally fascinated by all aspects of the past. At one point, he and a group of his friends spent weeks constructing a model of a bridge Julius Caesar built across the Rhine. My Cousin Ethel remembered another season when Dad’s big enthusiasm was fencing.
Studious though he was, my father was not the brightest boy in his class. This title went to Charlie Ross, a gangling, rather shy young man who read at least as many books as Dad, and had a talent for handling words that won him the admiration of the school’s favorite teacher, Miss Tillie Brown. Charlie was editor of the yearbook and the class valedictorian. On graduation day, Miss Tillie gave him a big kiss. Dad was one of several boys who protested this favoritism. But Miss Tillie refused to apologize. “When the rest of you do something worthwhile, you’ll get your reward, too,” she said. As we shall see, Dad never forgot those words.
Charlie was one of my father’s closest friends. But more than friendship attracted him to another member of the class - a very pretty blonde girl named Elizabeth Virginia Wallace, known to her friends as Bess. They had already known each other for a long time. They had attended Sunday school together at the First Presbyterian Church when they were kindergarten age. My father often says it took him another five years to get up the nerve to speak to her, but this can be partly explained by geography. They went to different grammar schools until the Trumans sold their house on Chrysler Street and moved to new quarters on Waldo Street. When Dad transferred to fifth grade in the Columbian School, he found Bess Wallace in his new class. Everyone in the family seems to agree that he was in love with her, even then. “To tell the truth,” my Cousin Ethel said, “there never was but one girl in the world for Harry Truman, from the first time he ever saw her at the Presbyterian kindergarten.” This was the voice of authority speaking. Cousin Ethel went all through school with Dad and Mother. In high school, they used to meet regularly at the Noland house to study Latin with the help of Cousin Ethel’s sister, Nellie, who was a whiz in the language. They apparently spent most of their time fencing, however.
I am sure that Mother was the best female fencer in town, and she was probably better than most of the boys. To this day, I find it hard to listen to stories of my mother’s girlhood without turning an envious green, or collapsing into despair. She was so many things that I am not. She was a marvelous athlete - the best third baseman in Independence, a superb tennis player, a tireless ice skater - and she was pretty besides. Sometimes I think she must have reduced most of the boys in town to stuttering awe. Mother also had just as many strong opinions at eighteen as she has now, and no hesitation about stating them Missouri style - straight from the shoulder. What man could cope with a girl like that - especially when she could also knock down a hot grounder and throw him out at first or wallop him six love at tennis? Sometimes, when someone looks skeptical about my thesis that my father was always an extraordinary man, I’m tempted to give them the best capsule proof I know - he married my mother. Only someone who was very confident that he was no ordinary man would have seen himself as Bess Wallace’s husband.
Although they were frequently together in the big crowd of cousins and friends who picnicked and partied during their high school years, they drifted apart after they graduated. Again, geography was the villain. John Anderson Truman took a terrible beating, speculating on the Kansas City grain market in 1901, and in 1902, the Trumans had to sell their house on Waldo Street and move to Kansas City, Missouri. My father had hoped - in fact, expected - to go to college. But that was out of the question now. He tried for West Point and Annapolis but was turned down because of his bad eyes. So, like most young men his age (seventeen), he went to work. To the great distress of his teacher, Mrs. White, he also abandoned his piano lessons. The long years of preparation necessary for a classical pianist’s career seemed out of the question now.
My father worked for a summer as a timekeeper with the Santa Fe Railroad. Then for several years, he was a bank clerk. He made considerable progress at this job, going from $35 to $120 a month, and handling a million dollars a day in his cage. One of his fellow fledgling bankers was Arthur Eisenhower, whose younger brother Ike was still in high school in Abilene, Kansas. On Saturdays, Dad ushered at the local theaters to make extra money - and enjoy free of charge all the vaudeville acts and traveling drama groups that came to Kansas City.
In 1906, John Anderson Truman asked my father to return to the Young farm and help him run this 600-acre establishment, as well as 300 acres nearby, which belonged to Dad’s uncle, Harrison Young, after whom he was named. It was sometime during these years - no one seems to remember precisely the date - that Dad regained Bess Wallace’s attention, this time permanently.
My Cousin Ethel Noland was the unchallengeable authority on the occasion, because it was from her home that my father returned the famous (in the Truman family, anyway) cake plate, which enabled him to renew the acquaintance. “Mrs. Wallace was very neighborly,” Cousin Ethel explained, “and she loved to send things over to us - a nice dessert or something, just to share it.” As a result, there were often Wallace cake plates sitting around the Noland house, waiting to be returned. One Saturday or Sunday my father was visiting, when Cousin Ethel remarked that it was about time someone got around to returning one of these plates. Dad volunteered with something approaching the speed of light, and the young lady who answered his knock at the Wallace door was the very person he wanted to see.
I believe there really are no explanations that completely explain why two people fall in love with each other. But if you live with them long enough, you can see glimpses of explanations, and I will advance one here that throws some light on my father’s character at the same time. I think the secret of his success with my mother was his absolute refusal to argue with her - a policy he has followed to this day. From his very early years, my father was known as the peacemaker in the Truman-Young families. Even among his Noland cousins, he is still remembered as an expert in resolving arguments. Right straight through his presidential years, he continued to play this role in our highly combative clan. Occasionally, he complained mightily to me in his letters about the prevalence of “prima donnas,” as he called the more difficult members of the family. But he continued to exercise this gift for peacemaking in private - and in public.
Contrary to her public image, my mother is a very combative person. There is nothing vindictive or mean about her. She just likes to argue. I am the same way. To this day, we cannot get together for more than twen
ty minutes without locking verbal horns. (Whereupon Dad will groan, “Are you two at it again?”) Who else but a young man smart enough not to argue with Bess Wallace could have persuaded a girl like that to marry him?
By 1914, when my grandfather, John Anderson Truman, died, it was more or less understood that Mother and Dad were paired. She went to my grandfather’s funeral, and my father was a regular visitor at the Wallace house on North Delaware Street. Contrary to some of the biographical legends, he did not commute by horseback from the farm at Grandview. At first he came by train and streetcar and later in a magnificent 1910 Stafford with a brass-rimmed windshield and Prest-O-Lite lamps.
Some people have claimed that he bought the car to impress his future mother-in-law, Mrs. Wallace, who supposedly did not approve of the match. But no one in the family believes that story. Sometimes the tale is embellished, to make my mother the richest girl in Independence and my father some poor disheveled dirt farmer, desperately attempting to hide his poverty behind a high-powered engine. This is plain nonsense. By now, I trust I have established as undeniable fact that the Trumans were not poor. They had suffered financial reverses, but they still had those 900 acres of prime Missouri topsoil on the Young farms to fall back on. As my Cousin Ethel often said, “There was always a feeling of security there.”
What good times they had in that cousinly, neighborly crowd. Whether my father was commuting from his bank job in Kansas City, where he lived with his first cousins, the Colgans, or from the farm at Grandview, when he got to Independence, there always seemed to be a party in progress. My Cousin Ethel had a wonderful picture of the crowd enjoying a watermelon feast in the Colgan backyard. My mother and her brothers are there, all, as Cousin Ethel put it, “into watermelon up to our ears.” Life magazine once begged her to let them publish it, but they received a frosty no because Cousin Ethel thought Mother looked undignified.
There were practical jokes galore that kept everyone laughing. No one loves a practical joke more than my father, so it doesn’t surprise me that he was deep in most of them. Among the favorites was one Dad helped cook up on his cousin, Fred Colgan, and another friend, Edwin Green. They and the girls in the crowd went picnicking on the banks of the Missouri one day. Fred Colgan and Ed Green decided, just for the fun of it, to put a message in a bottle, toss it in the river, and see if they got an answer. My father and the other young jokers promptly concocted two imaginary girls in Mississippi who wrote deliciously teasing letters to Messrs. Colgan and Green. Pretty soon there was a veritable romance budding, with my father and his fellow jokers fiendishly mailing letters and even phony pictures to friends in Mississippi who remailed them to poor Fred Colgan and Ed Green, who were by now getting desperately lovesick. Finally, one of the older members in the family put a stop to it, lest they have a couple of romantic nervous breakdowns on their hands. Fred Colgan took the news especially hard, and, I have been told, did not speak to my father or the other jokers for months.
With Dad’s ability to play the piano and his love of a good joke, he was often the life of the party. Another story that everyone loves to tell concerns his antics en route to a wedding in 1913. The bridegroom was a highly successful young businessman, and he had a very formal wedding. Dad borrowed a tuxedo from one friend and an opera hat from my mother’s brother, Frank Wallace. The hat was collapsible, and en route to the reception, riding in a horse-drawn cab, Dad tried to put his head out the window to tell the driver the address. His hat hit the top of the window and collapsed. Everyone went into hysterics at “the little fried egg thing sitting on the top of his head,” to quote my Cousin Ethel. Dad let the hat perch there all the way over to the reception while the cab rocked with laughter. When they finally arrived, they had to sit outside the bride’s house for a good five minutes, recovering their senses. “We were carefree and a little irresponsible, I think,” my Cousin Ethel said. Those words are a pretty good paraphrase of the fundamental, almost idyllic happiness that comes through to me in the recollections I have heard and overheard of my father’s youth in pre-World War I Independence.
Happy memories are a priceless asset to a man when he becomes a public servant. They deepen and broaden his vision of his country’s value and make him more generous, I think, more committed to widening the opportunities for happiness for the generations that follow him.
These years also helped to form in my father his deliberate, methodical approach to problems. From his early twenties to his early thirties, he was a farmer - not a gentleman farmer but a working one, toiling most of the time under John Anderson Truman’s stern eye. Off the political platform, when he talked about learning how to plow a straight furrow, he often added, “It had to be straight. If it wasn’t, I heard about it from my father for the next year.” These were the years when Dad also developed that sturdy physique which prompted us to snort with indignation when someone called him “the little man in the White House.” Riding a gang plow across a field behind a team of four horses or four mules took muscle, and added more all the time.
When my father discussed his farming days, the sheer physical labor of it became apparent. “I used to milk cows by hand. I used to plow with a four-horse team, instead of a tractor,” he said once during the White House years. “I have two nephews on the same farm that get much more out of that farm than I ever did. But they do it with machinery. They milk cows by machine, and they plow with a tractor and they plant with a tractor and they bale hay with a tractor. I don’t think that those boys could follow me up a corn row to save their lives, because they ride and I walked.”
But the most important thing about a farmer’s life is the steady, methodical nature of his work. Dad could count the revolutions of a gang-plow’s wheel, and figure out exactly how long it would take him to plow a field half a mile square. Things had to be done on a schedule, but nothing much could be done to hurry the growth of the corn or the wheat. The pace of the farm was reflected in the pace of the era. There was no sense of frantic urgency, no burning need to hurry. As Cousin Ethel said, “Harry was always a deliberate man.”
MY FATHER WAS even deliberate about courting my mother. Sometimes I think that if World War I hadn’t come along, he might not have married her until he was forty or fifty, and I might never have gotten here. He proposed and they became engaged shortly before he left for France. He was thirty-four, she was thirty-three. Mother gave him her picture. On the back, she wrote, “Dear Harry, May this photograph bring you safely home again from France - Bess.” Dad carried this picture with him inside his tunic, through training days and in the mud and danger of the Western Front. That same picture sat on his desk in the White House, and still sits on his desk in the Truman Library. I didn’t really know the man who went to France, but I have heard from his own lips the admission that the war changed him enormously. He is still fond of saying that he got his education in the army.
It was quite an education. Among the teachers were the brawling Irishmen of Battery D of the 129th Field Artillery. Products of Kansas City’s toughest ward, they had run through three commanding officers before Dad took charge of them. As many would discover in the years to come, no one pushed Harry Truman around. But here, as in so many other areas of his life, his toughness emanated not only from his inborn character but from his knowledge of how the job had to be done. As a student of military history, he had a clear-eyed perception of how an army was supposed to operate. Still, it must have been enormously encouraging to discover that he had the natural ability to make this theoretical knowledge work, with the unruly Irish of Battery D. He came out of the army convinced that if he could lead these wild men, he could lead anyone.
One story I remember from Dad’s army days - I have heard it repeated ad infinitum in the family - concerns one of the many times throughout his life that he lost his glasses. The uncanny luck he has had with his glasses is enough to make one wonder if Martha Ellen Truman did not negotiate some special arrangement with the Deity when she put spectacles on her five
-year-old-son. One night, early in the Argonne offensive, Dad was riding his horse toward the German lines to take up his usual position, well in advance of Battery D, and sometimes of the infantry, where he could study the German lines and telephone firing instructions back to the battery. As he rode under a low-hanging tree, the branches swept his glasses off his face. The horse, oblivious to the disaster, kept on going, and the road was jammed with marching men and lumbering cannons. Dad had a reserve pair of glasses in his baggage, but that was in a wagon at the end of the column. There was no time to go back for it. They were moving on a strict to-the-minute schedule. There he was in the middle of the biggest battle in the history of the world, practically blind. He turned around, frantically trying to catch a glimpse of the glasses on the road. A glint of light on the horse’s back - dawn was just beginning to break - caught his eye. There were the glasses, sitting on Dobbin’s rump.
Another of my father’s favorite soldier stories concerns some post-Armistice antics of Battery D. In those days, many Irish-Americans held a grudge against England. Some of them still hold it. One day, Battery D and the rest of the 35th Division assembled for a review by General Pershing and the Prince of Wales - later King Edward VIII. “As we marched off the field, General Pershing and the Prince of Wales and his staff were crossing a little creek not far from me,” Dad says. “And as we marched on the other side of the creek with the General and his staff, one of my disrespectful corporals or sergeants yelled: ‘Oh Capitaine. What did the little so and so say about freeing Ireland?’
“If Pershing had decided to hear that remark, I suppose I would have gone to Leavenworth and stayed there the rest of my life. He didn’t hear it, thank goodness.”
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